Sorry for the delay in responding, been away from my collaborative workstation for a bit.

In terms of my garbled and wandering post, the distinction I was attempting to draw was between work (art) produced within a broadly art like orbit (oh dear) AND work (colllaborations with evil mad scientists) which reduces the artlike ness of the work (the sort of stuff which fills stands at trade fairs) to spectacle.

I am conscious that this may seem dismissive or pompous or elitist (in sense that Bourdieu relates the concept of "taste") but the difficulty with trying to discuss the edge of art and say interactive design when looking at technology, artists and programmers and so on, seems to me to be increasingly about the nature and form that the collaboration between them takes.

An example to illustrate my vague badly focussed point might be something like when French Cubists were enlisted by the military to paint cubist patterning on camouflage netting during the Great War, to disguise tank and gun positions on the front line. The artists were employed (commissioned) and asked to do what they do, paint distended and fragmented forms onto the canvas (netting). They were left to produce forms and patterns of their own design and the only restriction placed on them was the colour pallette of camouflage paints.

Is this an example of a healthy collaboration between art and not art or is it a commission with guide lines, AND an underlying intention for the work, being that it successfully FUNCTIONS in not art terms.

Isn't there another thread, which is the collaboration with science/ soft engineering for funding reasons?Sci-art funding has been one of the main commisioning sources ion the U.K. for years and has resulted in a lot of technology as spectacle work here, kind of "end of the pier" work, which is IMO the very stuff Pall is referring to.

The collaboration with other fields of cultural production nearly always seems to produce work which is lacking in some way for me, maybe thats my taste buds talking or maybe its to do with something around intention and if collaboration with "not art" inevitably means the work is completed or is successful in terms which art cannot reach...

Why would you want to suggest that I would "clamor"? and what would the "action" be?and loads of people would hopefully hate me for itAND I imagine there is a whole chorus (massed) behind the "utopian vibe" humming ecstatically.And Andy Warhol... didn't seem to be able take care of himself, never mind taming the bastard art marketAND "media art necessarily intersects with commericial > production"Just sounds like something the Borg would say..Im off to look at some brilliant free work.Patrick